How Halo ODST Creators Built a Blockbuster Game in 14 Months

There's no question that Halo 3: ODST will be a hit—each of the previous titles in the first-person-shooter franchise proved that a blockbuster video game can out-gross even the biggest movie opening. The Halo games have also turned Bungie into the Pixar of the gaming industry, a studio that inspires cult-like devotion from fans by remaining technically innovative, creatively insulated and wildly profitable. Even if it doesn't break any sales records, ODST will be a success. The real question is whether Bungie's latest experiment—a first-person shooter designed, coded and released in just 14 months—can change the industry, showing that major studios can move more quickly, spinning pulp tales worth $60 a pop in just a year's time.

ODST wasn't always planned as a high-stakes gamble. The original idea was to build a quick, downloadable mini-campaign for Halo 3set in the Halo universe, amounting to some 3 hours of fresh gunplay. "It started out ambitious creatively, but controlled technically," Joe Staten, ODST's creative director and writer tells PM. "It ended up equally ambitious on the creative front as on the production side. We realized that we could just keep adding more content, make the game longer if we wanted to. It went from an expansion pack, to what we're now calling a full-fledged game."

The shift from cheap, downloadable content to a full-price, two-disc release was based on two main factors. First, Staten says he was able to draw from a team of Bungie veterans, all of whom had at least a decade of experience with Halo games. And he had the Halo 3 engine, still relatively new back in 2008. The final result could be an alternate take on today's first-person shooter. Instead of a years-in-the-making death-match factory game engine that contains a quick campaign as a lead-in to online game play, new big-budget shooters could use existing game engines to tell full-length stories that live or die on their own narrative merits.

"If you're making a game that takes two or three years, for the first year and a half, you can't actually make the game," says Staten. "You really spend at least half the development time, if not more, struggling with an engine that's still not stable. With ODST, we had none of those problems. The Halo 3 engine was already bulletproof." There were tweaks, of course, such as adding a night-vision feature called VISR mode, a kind of active heads-up display that outlines enemies in red, friendlies in green, and buildings and objects in yellow. There are new weapons, too—a silenced submachine gun and a silenced pistol. Perhaps the biggest gameplay change is the return of health packs. Bungie revolutionized first-person shooters with its regenerative health mechanic in the first Halo, allowing players to take damage, and then wait behind cover for their shields to recharge. But too much abuse, and your health would chip away, forcing you to scrounge for medical supplies. The result was an entirely new pace for action sequences that punished constant headlong charges, but minimized the need for recurring scavenger hunts. Other game developers copied Halo's regenerative health, and eventually banished health kits altogether. Bungie followed suit in Halo 2 and 3, only to revive the seemingly outdated mechanic in ODST.

There's a common thread to all these changes, none of which was technically difficult to pull off. The goal wasn't to improve on Halo 3's engine and gameplay, but to tell a different kind of story. In ODST, you're not playing as Master Chief, the unstoppable cyborg killing machine of the previous games. You're an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, the equivalent of an Airborne Ranger, separated from your squad mates in a city occupied by alien forces. Each clue you come across triggers a flashback, and a narrative leap into one of those squad mates. When you're navigating dark streets and darker buildings, VISR mode creates a kind of neon-noir look, a cityscape of abandoned police cars and shadows filled with glowing, silhouetted threats. The special-ops-oriented weapons provide the occasional spooky, special-ops kill, but the increased vulnerability and the general devolution of your own abilities makes the biggest impact. "We realized over time that Master Chief had become almost ridiculously powerful," Staten says. "Taking away his health [after the first Halo] made him, I think, less human. Other than dying, it was very hard to feel vulnerable."

In ODST, whether you're following the trail of your squad as the rookie, or reliving their firefights, you feel vulnerable. A plasma round or two won't permanently damage you, but successive hits trigger a constant beeping as your health bar shrinks. "We also made you a little shorter, you run a little slower; you don't jump as high. It promotes a feeling that's different. You feel like an ODST," says Staten. Staten's team spent months fine-tuning these minor changes, trying to tease out a different kind of Halo experience without trashing years of gamer goodwill. It's important to note that these aren't intended as incremental improvements, but specific, story-oriented tweaks. Even the huge, open world-style nighttime urban environment, which was the team's most challenging technical element, was intended to enhance the game's narrative tone. "Compared to previous Halo games, as well as shooters, the pacing is very, very good," says Staten. "In shooters it's extremely difficult to get people to calm down, take a breath, listen to some story, and then start murdering again. In the way [ODST] is structured, where you're in this moody, nighttime city, then sent into these high-action, high-intensity daytime flashback missions, it creates a natural rhythm. It's less of a gameplay innovation than the previous games have seen, but it's a big step forward in how to tell a story well, how to create a believable, tension-filled experience, but not an exhausting one."

In fact, Staten claims that nearly all of the new additions in ODST are an attempt to move the genre forward creatively. Enemies and friendly soldiers have always delivered dialogue triggered by specific combat actions—taunting you for taking cover, or praising a shot—but during flashback scenes, your character has his own context-sensitive dialogue. Depending on which squad mate you're playing, you might say, "Changing mags" while reloading, or bark, "That all you got?" while trading gunfire. Another minor feature is what Staten calls "Sadie's story," a series of audio files that you can download from various pay phones, health-kit stations and other terminals. A cross between a comic book and a radio play, these files offer a self-contained story in 30 acts, set during the previous night's invasion. And instead of simply offering you an achievement for your troubles, discovering Sadie's story unlocks caches of weapons and vehicles throughout the city. Neither of these concepts is inherently new—Duke Nukem delivered plenty of lame one-liners, and games like Bioshock feature audio tracks that detail the backstory. Staten hopes that these features will feel new through immersing players more deeply in different characters and providing a tangible gameplay reward for finding what would otherwise be useless Easter eggs.

Titles like Fallout 3 have been followed up with extensive DLC expansions, but these were shorter than the game's original length, more like side missions than a stand-alone story. Whether ODST successfully carves out a niche for streamlined, story-driven shooters that people think of as full games will depend largely on how well it sells, particularly at $60. Playing through the campaign, some of the new features seemed more effective than others. The VISR mode is more interesting than it sounds, and the increased vulnerability resurrects some of the tension from the first Halo. As repetitive as the nighttime city-crawling can be, fighting the same Brutes and Grunts in the dark feels new, and Staten might be right about the pacing—the game is moody at times, and classic Halo at others. The in-character dialogue, however, isn't revolutionary. Whatever's coming out of your mouth, you still move and fight the same as the last squad mate you were playing. And the rookie, the person you inhabit the most, is still a mute, reinforcing one of the lazier conventions of first-person shooters. Finally, there's Sadie, the girl in the audio files, and her mysterious relationship with the city's artificial intelligence. Whether gamers buy into ODST's attempt to downplay technical breakthroughs, while highlighting the shooter's ability to tell new kinds of stories, might come down to Sadie. I liked the campaign's narrative just fine, particularly the way it sidestepped the convolutions of the main Halo plot line, telling a more focused story about one small part of a larger war. But the reason I'm heading back into New Mombasa isn't to rack up more headshots or get 10 Needler kills in a row. I only found 16 of those 30 audio files, and dammit if I can't stop wondering whether Sadie's going to make it out alive.

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